


Her Second Guest

by GretchenSinister



Series: My Top 10 Rise of the Guardians Otherships & Crossovers Fics [6]
Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012), Sneedronningen | The Snow Queen - Hans Christian Andersen
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-20
Updated: 2019-04-20
Packaged: 2020-01-20 15:08:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18527557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Original Prompt: "There’s plenty of theories out there, that Jack isn’t the only winter spirit around. What if he met the Snow Queen from Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale? (The original one, not the one they’re making ‘official’ for the next Disney movie)"I really quite like the little fill I made for this one. Jack meets the Snow Queen in the woods while she has Kay back at her palace. He sees her for what she is, but she doesn’t recognize him.





	Her Second Guest

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr on 5/9/2015.

He sees her, and she sees him. Or, he thinks he sees her, and she thinks she sees him.  
  
She glides through the forest on a magnificent sledge, with runners and fittings gleaming brighter than the moon. The wood of it is polished and painted so smoothly it might as well be ivory, save that ivory was never that brilliantly white. The canopy above her is glass, and the snowflakes that fall on it do not melt. She sits within a profusion of white furs, and it is impossible to tell which are her robes and which might be part of the sledge’s seat. White silk sewn with irregular pearls peeps from behind the furs around her neck. Her skin is flawless as new-fallen snow.  
  
Jack sees that her eyes are not quite as blue as his own.  
  
He notes other things. She has a driver, so heavily swathed in furs that there might not be a person within them at all. Her six white horses are very small and neat, and when Jack looks at them from the corner of his eye, he can see that the animals with the silver harnesses have antlers than no horses ever had.  
  
And he looks at her again, and he sees her. Her canopy is not glass but ice, all the silver is ice, all the white is snow. Even her furs are snow. Though he sees this, he can’t rid himself of the idea that they must be wonderfully warm, delightful to sleep in, especially since they are so close to her skin. He can’t rid himself of this thought even though he knows that her skin must be just as cold as his.  
  
She looks on him seeming-kindly, and he wonders what she sees. Nothing but a pale young man, simply and poorly dressed? Does she think he has been walking a long time in the snow, given the rime of frost on his short cloak? Does she wonder why his feet, though bare, are not reddening with frostbite? Can she even see his feet from her place amid her furs, her snow? She meets his eyes, and though the wind ruffles the fur at the edge of her hood just as it lifts Jack’s hair, Jack can tell that she doesn’t see him the way he sees her. She sees his blue, blue eyes, his coltish limbs, his innocent face.  
  
She smiles, and Jack knows that while they may be the same in some ways, in others they are not. He has never smiled like that, though he has smiled in nearly every other way. By some lights, he is an expert in the art. And so when he reads her smile, he does so as easily as he reads which clouds will bring forth snow. He knows that he looks like a thing she wants—a thing, not a person. And he knows what she is going to ask. Always unstoppable in the snow, it does not occur to her that Jack will say no. She is accustomed to overwhelming those that look like him.   
  
But Jack has learned to look twice at those that look at him, and he cannot be dazzled by a smile that promises nothing of what she pretends it does.  
  
“You look cold, young man,” she says, in a voice low and smooth. “Join me in my sledge. I will take you where you long to go.”  
  
Is it time to refuse? Is it time to bring the storm here? (For she would bring a storm against one who dared to refuse her.) He looks into her eyes and her smile and a little deeper yet. It is almost like flying. (He thinks of it that way because it is something he does not see other people, the ones who cannot see him, do.) And he finds a boy, a little younger than he looks, sleeping under a snowbank that he thinks is a down blanket. The fine palace around him is nothing but ice.  
  
Boys die of such things. Jack does not know if he could stop this one from dying—perhaps he has already gone, perhaps that is why she is asking Jack to join her. And it is hard to do anything unseen. But he could try. He wants to try. It reminds him that he is not cold through and through. And even. Even if he was. That boy should not die under a snowbank in a palace of ice. Jack knows this. He knows that children cannot freely choose to be led to such places.  
  
Unseen or not, he knows the boy should not be dying alone where he is. He knows he must protect him as well as he can, deep in his core that is not frozen quite yet, and, with this choice, may never be. He looks away from the inside of the palace and back to her eyes. He smiles as brightly as his eyes shine. “I’d love to come with you,” he says, and reaches up his hand. 

**Author's Note:**

> Comments from Tumblr:
> 
> kazechama said: Utter perfection this!
> 
> mira-eyeteeth said: Oh, this was lovely~


End file.
